EDMONTON — This is a column that I could perhaps write up formally and publish with a fancypants scholarly-sounding title. “Some Structural Considerations in the 2019 Alberta Election,” maybe. (It’s the “Some” that really adds the contemplative, donnish flavour.) But this article is really mere news consumer advice. The first published election poll since the dissolution of Alberta’s assembly appeared on Sunday, and we can probably expect the trickle of polls to become a torrent now. Or at least a bubbly, vivacious creek.

Alberta has been zapped so often by bad political polling that an attitude of nihilism, a suspicion of any poll, still prevails here. The pollsters actually did not do as badly as you might think in handling Alberta’s 2015 election, if you look back. (2011 was the ugly one.) The voter intention estimates are reasonable in retrospect. It was, however, difficult to know what to make of them at the time because it is inherently tricky to translate votes into seats in a three-way race.

We can probably expect the trickle of polls to become a torrent now

In studying or just glancing at polls of a two-way race, you can concentrate on one super-relevant parameter: the distance between the big parties. X minus Y. In a three-way race under first-past-the-post voting, it is a lot more complicated. If Orange Thing is in the lead, small changes in the splits between Blue Thing and Purple Thing lower on the ballot can affect Orange’s seat count in a chaotic way.

Interpreters and guessers had other disadvantages, of course. It was hard to imagine that Albertans were really going to send a New Democratic majority to the legislature. The down-ballot struggle between Jim Prentice’s PCs and Brian Jean’s rump Wildrose Party was not easy for cosseted, Chardonnay-bibbing urban reporters to assess.

Alberta Liberal Leader David Khan, left, and former leader David Swann knock on doors in Calgary on March 31, 2019.Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia News

In principle this election should be easier analytically. There are two highly dominant parties. Sure, there is some entertaining activity, deserving of discussion, on the fringes. That familiar piece of political vapourware, the Alberta Party, has a well-known leader in irascible former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel. There is a breakaway right-wing party, the Freedom Conservatives. The Alberta Liberals have shot for the moon with a proposal to eliminate income tax for most Albertans (raising the provincial personal exemption to $57,250) and to replace the revenue with a harmonized sales tax (they suggest eight per cent will do the trick).

But even bad polls should give us some warning if these parties, or others, show signs of making a breakthrough. For now it seems like a safe assumption that this is an ordinary two-party election.

For now it seems like a safe assumption that this is an ordinary two-party election

Which leaves us with a different question: if the election is close in the overall number of votes, which party’s votes will translate to seats more efficiently? Alberta has never held a close election, either vote-wise or seat-wise, at all. But other provinces, most memorably B.C., have encountered the scenario in which a party “loses” in the popular vote count and wins a majority anyway.

If you have watched a few federal elections, you may assume that it is the United Conservatives who have a vote-efficiency problem in the hinterland. So they do, but the New Democrats have a vote-concentration issue of at least equal size, and probably greater in practice.

That issue is Edmonton. No individual candidate in the PC or Wildrose parties got more than 54.6 per cent of the total vote anywhere in 2015. But 13 NDP candidates in Edmonton broke 60 per cent, and five of them had 70 per cent. Premier Rachel Notley, in Edmonton-Strathcona, scored 82.4 per cent, winning the seat by more than 11,000 votes. (This time around, she is deemed so unbeatable that Strathcona is where the united right is running paper “PC” and “Wildrose” candidates because the UCP doesn’t want the zombie brands deregistered and revived by pranksters.)

Because the right is reasonably unified in 2019, the New Democrats are unlikely to win this election handily with the same overall vote share that they received in 2015 (40.7 per cent provincewide, including the enormous majorities in Edmonton). In 2015 they could not have asked for a more evenly split opposition (PC 27.9 per cent, Wildrose 24.3 per cent). If you take the 2015 election, and divide up the votes of the extinct Progressive Conservatives proportionally in each riding between NDP and UCP, you find that the New Democrats need to nab something like 30 per cent of the PC vote to control the assembly.

That is far from unimaginable. And of course the election map itself has been changed slightly to favour the big cities, which helps the New Democrats in the seat calculus a little. Alberta’s new election map keeps riding populations within tight bounds, so there is not much of a rural advantage baked into the seat math. (Calgary’s 26 ridings have an average of 47,661 residents according to the 2016 census; Edmonton’s have 46,654, and the rest of Alberta’s 46,332. Explicit “proportional representation” is rarely so proportional.)

Still, a toy model, given a nakedly unrealistic assumption of uniformity in how the NDP and UCP capture PC votes, suggests that the NDP probably do need to be ahead of the UCP in the provincewide vote total if they want to retain their majority. They may need to win the popular vote by much as seven or eight points in order to get there. A B.C.-type scenario, with vast oceans of dyed-orange votes in Edmonton failing to pay off in legislature seats, is possible. My math might be all wrong, of course, and this should not be considered a prediction. Unless, of course, it comes true.

Bill Buford spoke about moving to Lyon with his family for a year to write Dirt, and then staying five, about their lives now in New York, and the future ...

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